column: The Ultimate Reality Show Rises to New Lows

SLIGHTLY OFF THE MARK

 

                I’ve been thinking of the upcoming TV season, in much the way some people think of upcoming root canals or IRS audits.

                Sure, there’s the anticipation of a new season of imaginative, fun shows that explore the limits of probability with great dialogue and well scripted plotlines: Fringe, Supernatural, Pro Wrestling. Then there’s “Reality” TV.

                The biggest advantage of Reality TV is that the more of it there is, the less time I have to spend choosing what to watch.

                The Reality genre is much larger than I usually think of it as being. In fact, it’s been around as long as TV has, as far back as a 1948 show called Candid Camera. In its widest definition, it includes everything from game shows to one of my favorite programs, Mythbusters.

                So let’s narrow what I’m talking about down to a new sub-category, which I invented about five seconds ago: We’ll call it “Stupid Hateful Underhanded Reality”, or SHUR.

                Oh, SHUR.

                This brand of show presents people at their worst: hateful, back stabbing, stupid, and/or untalented. It's like Congress, only with better approval ratings.

                I remember the first time I heard about the TV show Survivor. What a great concept, I thought: A group of people must bond and work together, meet challenges, and show off the best of humanity.

                Silly me. The best of humanity doesn’t sell. The worst of humanity, that does.

                As a result, Reality programming has become an advance sign of the oncoming collapse of civilization, alongside fast food, the IRS, and teenagers who can’t keep their pants pulled up. (Just kidding, IRS!)               

( Then I realized something else could be a SHUR thing, something good: profit. For me. So I studied everything from Survivor and The Real World (which SO isn’t) to that cooking show with the screaming guy having a stroke, and the show set on the East coast with all the orange skinned female Umpa-Lumpas. Armed with a keyboard and a barf bag, I boiled them all down into my proposal, the perfect Reality TV show: )